Vultures over Europe
by Phillip Day
In 1901, Britain's Queen Victoria dies. For many, the passing of Britain's longest-living monarch symbolises the ending of an age. Many have known no different, millions having lived and died during the period of her monumental reign. A definite and significant passing is sensed by all - even an end it seems to the visible, moral austerity of the Victorian Era. The sobriety that characterises her magnificent funeral and the period of her mourning eventually passes, and the peoples around the world, raised under her sceptre, begin gathering themselves to contemplate their future.
Inventions, railways, the first airplanes, communications, electric street lamps and the advent of a new century promise the birth of a more alluring future - a bright, sophisticated new modern age of materialism, presided over by Victoria's son, the womaniser and profligate, King Edward VII. People relax and begin to have fun. Britain's power is at its zenith. The sun never sets on the British Empire. Merchants bring their goods to the West from the marvellous and exotic lands of Kipling. Excitement fires a million imaginations. Many sense the dawn of a New Age. The possibilities seem endless. And the soft but determined breeze of change caresses the cheeks of those whose faces are turned expectantly, searching towards the horizon of their future.
PROMOTING HATE
But psychiatry - this new 'science of the mind' - and its racist sub-philosophies
are to have tragic repercussions for Europe in the first half of the 20th
century. Psychiatry produces the necessary flame of racism towards the
end of the 1800's by pathologising into 'a disease' the hatred for others.
Authors Röder, Kubillus and Burwell report:
"In 1850, psychiatrist C T Groddeck was awarded a doctorate for his dissertation entitled "The Democratic Disease - A New Form of Insanity". In Groddeck's view, every democratically inclined person was insane. In 1854 his colleague, C J Wretholm, 'discovered' the 'Sermon Disease'. Psychiatrist P J Möbius lectured shortly thereafter on the 'psychological feeble-mindedness of the woman'.
Not long thereafter, the leading proponents of psychiatry in Germany were advocating the theory that anyone who refused military service for religious reasons was abnormal and 'sick'. A psychiatrist named Adolf Hoppe characterised conscientious objection to military service as an 'unmistakable expression of ethnic inferiority'. One of psychiatry's leading figures, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, added to his list of varieties of mental disorders 'political and reformatory insanity' - meaning any inclination to form a different opinion from that of the masses. An excellent tool was thus created for politicians to denounce opponents. With the help of psychiatric classifications, it was now possible to perform the character assassination of a political enemy in the wink of an eye - anyone who disagreed was obviously insane."
By 1871, the trend is in full-swing. Psychiatrist Carl Stark publishes a treatise entitled "The Psychical Degeneration of the French People", in which he presents the concept that the French have degenerated into mass-delusion, warmongering and delirium. Now, with being French a mental illness, others come forward. Löwenfeld discusses 'the national character of the French and its sickly excesses':
"The kind of mental abnormalities emerging nowadays belong to a borderline area which I label as psychopathy, psychopathic inferiorities, psychopathic conditions, and so on. I believe therefore that it is justified now to talk about a 'psychopathia gallica', which should by now be obvious."
Psychiatry is soon seen adopting the paradox of glorifying war and xenophobia while at the same time denouncing pacifism and tolerance of minorities. The warmongering pronouncements of Nietzsche, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Joseph-Arthur, Comte de Gobineau and others of their persuasion have, by the first decade of the 1900's, taken firm root and primed Europe for war. The Illuminati cryptocracy and its banks, championed by the Rothschild dynasty, are forever courting powerful leaders. They have not been idle in their efforts to subvert nationalism, denigrate and dismantle national sovereignty, corrupt the money supply with their inflatable paper notes of debt (paper currency), and plant in the minds of many the desirability to move towards a world order. Europe has become a patchwork of national treaties which compel countries to go to the aid of their treaty partners in the event that war is declared upon the partner. All that is needed is a spark.
INTO THE BREACH
On the 28th June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand visits the troubled Austro-Hungarian
rebel province of Serbia and enters Sarajevo in a motorcade. As the car
carrying the Archduke and his wife Sophie halts to correct a wrong turning,
Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip steps out of the crowd outside Moritz
Schiller's delicatessen and blasts two shots into the vehicle, hitting
the Archduke in the throat and Sophie in the abdomen.
The subsequent deaths of the Archduke and his wife set into motion the now famous catastrophic treaty landslide. On 27th July, Austria severs diplomatic ties with Serbia. The following day, spurred on by Austro-Hungarian public outrage over the shooting of Ferdinand by 'a degenerate', Austria declares war on Serbia. The Russians react by mobilising to the aid of their treaty partner, Serbia. Austria reacts by calling in its treaty partner, Germany. On 2nd August, Berlin demands passage for its troops through Belgium. On 3rd August, Germany declares war on 'degenerate' France. On 4th August, Britain comes to the aid of its treaty partner, France, and declares war on Germany. On 5th August, Austria declares war on Russia. World War 1 has begun.
The outbreak of hostilities on a scale hitherto unseen
introduces Nietzsche's long-awaited Aryan war. That this is a glorious
thing is regularly expounded upon in the almost unbelievable psychiatric
literature of the day. Yet not even after the Dantéan phenomenon
of millions dead and 20 million wounded will psychiatry be repentant of
the role it played. By way of illustrating psychiatry's surviving, racist
ethos following World War 1 and the implications of this for psychiatry's
involvement in another future war, witness Dr Johannes Bresler, editor-in-chief
of the Psychiatrisch-Neurologische Wochenzeitschrift (Psychiatric Neurological
Weekly), who later in 1926 ominously remarks:
"The world war [WW1] was sacred to us and will remain sacred to
us for all eternity. It was and is our just cause."
'WAR NEUROSES'
One of the major battles fought in World War 1 is at Verdun. This battle
is fought between France and Germany and begins with an artillery bombardment
unprecedented in ferocity. The French draw up over four miles of hub-to-hub
artillery and on the opposing front, the Germans have a similar strike
force waiting. It takes France eight days of total national production
and all their transportation facilities to haul the newly produced ammunition
to the front in preparation for the opening artillery barrage. The Germans
begin the attack on 21st February 1916.
Both sides fire millions of artillery rounds before the actual infantry advances begin. Over half a million men are lost during the ten months of battle which follow. First the Germans advance and then the French, driving back the Germans with the help of the British, who open up a major action on the River Somme. During the four-month Battle of the Somme alone, the repeated, atrocious engagements with artillery and machine guns claim the lives of 600,000 Allied troops, two-thirds of them British. German losses are estimated at 450,000. All day long, soldiers are ordered out of their trenches into the vulnerable line of sight of enemy machine guns and slaughtered. Many of the soldiers have their hearing blown out by the unbelievable detonations of the apocalyptic artillery barrages preceding the attacks, and are incapable of hearing orders above the din.
Significantly, psychiatry introduces the new concept of 'war neurotics' to the world as unprecedented numbers of soldiers experience fits of quivering, crying, hysteria and vomiting. Widespread desertions from frontline units alarm the German authorities of the day, ever promoting the 'glorious war' ethic and the struggle for 'Teutonic supremacy'. The unsettling, un-German problem of the 'war neurotic' is quickly passed to the psychiatrists. The aim is to render these soldiers fit for active duty again as quickly as possible. Drastic remedies are showcased, such as electroshock therapy, which sometimes has the desired effect of galvanising 'slackers' back to the front even before treatment, due to its appalling effects and rapidly spreading sinister reputation. Hamburg-based psychiatrist Dr Max Nonne recalls:
"The war brought us in Eppendorf a tremendous workload. We soon got to see sad pictures of men who were amputated, half-paralysed through head wounds, paralysed down to the legs, the bladder and the rectum because of bullets in the spine, of epileptics who had seizures because of head wounds. But after a few months, we saw a sight we had rarely seen before - the sight of hysteria virilis, the 'manly hysteria', which had once been described to us by Charcot in Paris. We had said then: 'This only happens to the French. In Germany, hysteria of the men does not exist.' But now we saw it often and in all forms: as paralysis of the vocal cords, as dumbness, as paralysis of the upper and lower extremities, as trembling in all parts of the body, as spasms of single muscles and muscle groups, as deafness, as inabilities to see and walk, and as dislocations in the most confounded forms."
LESS THAN MANLY
Röder et al agree that some of the trench problems of the First World
War soldier are extremely embarrassing for the German military authorities,
who are eager at the time to promote the manly virtues of the Great War:
"Sometimes in place of war neurosis, German psychiatrists used terms like 'traumatic neurosis', 'fright neurosis', 'grenade shock' or 'war hysteria'. In other countries, such as Britain, this hysteria was described as 'shell shock', 'concussion neurosis', 'gas neurosis' or 'battle fatigue'. However in 1915, the German army medical services forbade the use of the word 'hysteria' in military psychiatric diagnosis because it was contrary to the noble concept of honour befitting a warrior. In the eyes of the army, the diagnosis of a hysterical reaction was dishonourable and, therefore, banned. No doubt the German army was offended in part by the suggestion that its soldiers might be less than 'manly'. After all, 'hysteria' comes from the Greek 'hyster', meaning 'uterus', and connotes a woman's suffering, not the illness of a soldier."
Denying that soldiers are in any way 'sick' and therefore exempt from combat, German war authorities are able to use psychiatry as a justification for denying the symptoms that are cropping up in medical offices such as Dr Nonne's. Front-line commanders are expressly forbidden from sending the 'tremblers' and 'hystericals' away from the fighting. 'Kaufmann Therapy' awaits those who shirk battle and 'feign symptoms'. This controversial approach follows the line that war neurosis is a 'constitutional, psychopathic inferiority', and those suffering from it are plainly too weak to endure the beauty of the war.
Those undergoing the therapy are prepared with pre-shock suggestions. Then a strong alternating current is passed through the patient's head while the therapist repeats strong military commands in the form of 'psychic driving'. The patient is under the strict enforcement that he must be healed in one session. At the annual conference of the Gesellschaft Deutscher Nervenärzte in Bonn on 29th September 1917, Dr M Raether, head doctor of the Provinzial Heil und Pflegeinstitut, includes a demonstration of 'Kaufmann Cure' in his lecture.
Even in the eyes of the most forward-thinking psychiatrists of the day, the concept of treating shell shock with electric shock is radical and uncomfortably close to plain, old-fashioned torture. With no scientific evidence at all to back up the supposed efficacy of his treatments, Kaufmann and his followers are nevertheless allowed to continue, disciplining 'malingerers' with high voltage, hauling them back to the front, thereby cementing up embarrassing breaches in the honour and nobility of German military service.
An electric shock box was also available near the front for use by psychiatrists to kill their own soldiers. Dr Emil Gelny, later a Nazi Party member from 1933, founded electro-execution:
"Once a patient went unconscious from the effects of the electricity, the caretakers then had to attach four other electrodes to the hands and feet of the patient. Dr Gelny ran high voltage through them and after ten minutes at the most, the death of the patient would set in."
In spite of psychiatric measures like Kaufmann's being couched in pseudo-scientific terminology, and attempting to pass themselves off as 'cutting-edge medicine', there are those in the scientific community of the day who see their psychiatric colleagues "…sinking back into the barbarism of the Middle Ages." Röder et al report that psychiatry predictably had an ingenious answer to its attackers at this time:
"It took considerable courage to denounce the psychiatric movement of the era because critics were liable to be labelled with an unfavourable diagnosis by the very subjects of their criticism. This was no idle fear. In 1927, a professor of psychiatry from Hamburg named Ernst Ritterhaus actually came up with the diagnosis of 'mass psychosis of hostility toward psychiatry' for all critics of the psychiatric movement. In other words, 'if you disagree with us or challenge our methods, you are insane.'
The same diagnosis was applied to a large number of journalists, doctors, officers, legislators, manufacturers and law professors as well as the victims of psychiatry who had dared to challenge the utility and ethics of inhuman therapies. By then, it was almost impossible to argue logically against psychiatry - psychiatry was too irrational to allow for it."
In his extraordinarily arrogant declaration in 1899, leading psychiatrist P J Möbius had elevated psychiatry to the post of 'Judge of all Human Things', a position still occupied at that time in the minds of most by God Himself:
"The psychiatrist should be the judge about mental health, because only he knows what 'ill' means. If one views psychiatry in this way, then it turns from a servant into a ruler, and becomes what by nature it should be. The psychiatrist then becomes the judge of all human things, a teacher of the lawyer and theologian, a leader of the historian and the writer."
Plainly, even by the turn of the 20th century, German psychiatry already saw itself poised to influence the legislature, the media, religion and even history itself in its grandiose designs for control. The tools to enforce this control were by this time already nearing completion:
"The formula was as simple as it was chilling
in its implications. Beneath a shroud of a few impressive-sounding, Greek-
and Latin-based words, and cloaked with the presumed authority of a medical
science, to shut up your critic, simply pronounce him or her insane and
do so from the point of view of the omniscient expert."
THE CAULDRON RISING - BETWEEN THE WARS
By the turn of the 20th century, Weishaupt's master plan for world social,
economic and political domination had kicked into high gear for those
attempting to implement it. As the seeds of Weishaupt's and Engels' Communism
were watered into growth by Marx, Trotsky and Lenin, its branches spread
out across Tsarist Russia. Other peoples, dissatisfied with the old imperialism
of the 19th century, began to examine ways in which this novel and revolutionary
new way of structuring society could be applied in their own nations.
That 'Spartacus' Weishaupt's original thesis still forms the underpinning
of Communism well into the 20th century is clearly seen with the formation
of groups of German Communist revolutionaries in the chaotic aftermath
of post-World War 1 Europe. Known as 'Spartacists', their leaders included
Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, who were later hunted down by the
German Chancellor, Friedrich Ebert, captured and shot. In Hungary, Communist
revolution broke out under Béla Kun in March of 1919, resulting
in the establishment of a Communist satellite state. Kun himself would
later resign and move to Moscow, where he ironically became one of hundreds
of thousands of loyal Communists shot during Stalin's purges.
'LIFE UNWORTHY OF LIVING'
European psychiatry predictably survives World War 1 in great shape. In
the eyes of many, the horrors of the Great War cannot be adequately explained
by the Church as the intervention of any loving God. However the mental
sciences, with their evolutionary/eugenic underpinnings and cloak of indefatigable
science, offer their own explanations for why man does the things he does.
Studies in genetics, ongoing since the turn of the century, are redefining
in the minds of the public the haphazard nature of man. Eugenics states
that any perceived physical or mental abnormality in the population is
evidence of a genetic trait that must be eradicated to prevent its proliferation.
Into this context comes the first mention of the concept of 'life unworthy
of living'.
Many try to process the horrors of the Second World War without an understanding of the framework behind why the atrocities happened. Many times we read of the grotesque incongruity of the Nazi officer - a cultured and educated man, lover of Wagner and the arts, whilst at the same time capable of committing acts of genocide with an everyday banality of spirit. But it is precisely the explanation behind this paradox, so studiously avoided by Spielberg in Schindler's List, which gives us the chief reason why so many in Europe go along with the policies of the SS and their enforcer, SS-General Reinhard Heydrich. Heydrich is Himmler's deputy, head of the Reich security apparatus, and perhaps one of the most feared men in Germany.
The German people have been sold on evolution; on the
superiority of the white, Aryan race; on the need to sterilise or kill
those whose lives are deemed 'of no value'; sold on the utter conviction
that Germany is to be the seat of the New Order which will haul it from
the ignominious ashes of the First World War. Indeed Hitler's book, My
New Order, espouses these very concepts. But the underlying groundwork
providing the cultural acceptability of these fatal philosophies has already
been laid down by the eugenicists, psychiatrists and Darwinists of the
previous fifty years. Bruce Wiseman reports:
"Alfred Hoche, a professor of psychiatry, and Karl Binding, a
German jurist and retired professor of Wundt's alma mater, the University
of Leipzig, published 'The Release of the Destruction of Life Devoid of
Value' in Leipzig in 1920. It went a step further than the recommendation
of mere sterilisation. It advocated the outright killing of mental defectives,
'euthanasia' as it was called: 'For the idiots… the continuation of life
for society as well as for the person himself has no value.'
By 1922, at a psychiatric congress in Dresden, Germany, a proposal was put forward requesting legalization of euthanasia. The psychiatric social experiment called Eugenics had embarked on a road from which there was no turning back."
Throughout the 1920's and '30's, the language grows increasingly sinister and apocalyptic as the German proponents of racial hygiene and eugenics face scant opposition. Germany is in turmoil following the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles after World War 1. After signing the Treaty on 28th June 1919 in the famous railway carriage, English premier David Lloyd George is asked what has been accomplished. The English statesman replies, "Gentlemen, I have just signed the document which guarantees war in 20 years." These words are repeated in Lloyd George's memoirs, published after his administration in 1923.
Lloyd George's extraordinary admission is understood when one appreciates that the Treaty of Versailles is designed to leave Germany with nothing, not even the wherewithal to rebuild its economy and physical infrastructure from within. Fifteen years later Japan will encounter the same problem. A nation faced with such a future must go to war eventually to free itself and this is precisely the platform Hitler uses to gain power and control in the late 1920's after the financial collapse of the Weimar Republic.
The tremendous nationalistic vacuum generated by the hardships in Germany following World War 1 becomes the fertile soil which germinates the latent supremacist philosophies of Darwin, Malthus, Weishaupt, Wundt, Galton and Kraepelin. Germany wants to feel clean. Efficient. Redeemed.
In charge again.
ERNST RÜDIN
By 1930, a rising psychiatric luminary named Ernst Rüdin is articulating
his beliefs on the urgent need for Germany to "…do something about
the positive and negative eugenics before it is too late. For the negative,
the sterilisation of the genetically sick has to be closely looked at.…
It would be a blessing to know that genetically incompetent, unhappy people
would not be produced anymore. Much more national expansion would be created
through positive eugenics than we can imagine.
The fertility rate of the genetic undesirables is so great today that we have every reason in the interest of humanity to address ourselves to the prevention of the genetically weak. The increase of the hereditarily healthy that is so necessary to us as a nation today will cause less of a headache in the future."
The significance of the above statements, made by a man who will be the key player in implementing the racial hygiene policies of the Nazis in the years to come, is stark and shocking when one considers that these ideas are fully formed by psychiatry a full three years before the Nazis even came to power. Thus it is not the Nazis who are the creators of the eugenics program which will later underpin the Holocaust, it is German psychiatry. And it is psychiatry also which will, in the dark and hopeless years to follow, design, draw up and implement the murderous policies which will attempt to rid the Nazis of their 'mental defectives', political opponents, habitual criminals, 'genetically weak' and those whose lives will be deemed 'unworthy of living'.
The marriage of psychiatry to Nazism is to prove propitious. In 1933, when the Nazis ascend to power, a legal brief describing a new law gives the reader a chilling insight into the appalling turn Germany is about to take:
"With the passing of the Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Children, the German Nazi government took an important step for the future of our nation. Because of their nature, our previous government could not come to a decision, since German parliamentarianism has generally shown itself to be incapable of innovative steps for the salvation of our nation… Only the Nazi world view has reoriented us to the future, we have again remembered the learning of our lives, the purpose of the state, the fight for survival and life of our families, the species and the race! Hitler writes in his book 'Mein Kampf': 'Who is not healthy bodily or mentally is not allowed to perpetuate his malady in the body of his child.…' Therefore, this Act is a complete break from the small-mindedness of an outdated philosophy of life and the overblown and suicidal charity of past ages."
© Copyright 2003 Phillip Day
Further Resources:
The Mind Game by Phillip Day
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